by Ben Spatz
I saw a play called _The Designated Mourner_, written by and starring Wally Shawn, of _Princess Bride_ fame ("Never get involved in a land war in Asia!"). Then I saw the movie he directed of his script. It raised some very interesting issues. In the movie version, I dislike all the characters. In the play, Jack was a more sympathetic person. I don't think Wally Shawn can help but be somewhat sympathetic.
This play reminds me of the story told in the _Men in Feminism_ anthology, about the middle-class liberal Marxists hanging out with the genuine working-class proletarians, and how the "authentic" proletarians grow up and get settled and become conservative, while the "appropriating" idealists keep their working-class ideology intact. There is some important skepticism to be leveled at the middle-class people who claim to be down with the workers, but also there is nothing particularly cool about the workers who grow up and become middle-class and drop their politics. This is what the character of Jack is like. He has a very good point about the beauty of leaves and breezes and simple things, and that's a very zen point of view, but he extends it to a kind of anger and jealousy towards the bourgois that is totally un-zen. His criticism of "high" culture is well-taken, because "high" culture in this context means eurocentric white male culture, but I don't know if it really extends to a deeper question of whether high culture can ever have meaning in contrast to kitsch. It is in contrast to nonwestern nonwhite nonmale culture that "high" culture is tyrannical, not in contrast to western white male kitsch and capitalistic commercial "art."
Howard is a trickier question for me, because I agree to a large extent with his view on morals, and also with his lofty goals of healing the world, and after all I've recently been going through a spate of worrying about the suffering of the distant poor. My conclusion is that I want to have all the knowledge and powers of Howard, but with a totally different attitude. I want to know all that bourgois culture and have some of those same old leftist ideals, but I want to be a punk. I want to be irreverant and silly and pathetic and wild and NOT ARROGANT.